North Vancouver's own political BLOG dedicated to North Vancouver's political players and the decisions that shape our community.

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Politicians feeding greedingly at the public trough

This from The Province newspaper today. Sue Cook on the front page. Sue used to be a regular commentor on this blog but, she has been strangely absent for some time unless of course she still comments as an 'Anonymous.'

Mayors and councillors from across the province seem to be having a grand old time in Vancouver this week for their annual Union of B.C. Municipalities convention. It's undoubtedly good for the downtown hotel and beverage trade.

But, given the worrying economy, I think they should have stayed home this year and held their meetings by teleconference, saving a ton of taxpayers' money.

This, of course, is not how outgoing UBCM president Barbara Steele sees it. The Surrey councillor told me Tuesday she didn't know what the convention budget was, but said the sessions have been jam-packed.

Steele added it was important for local politicians to network and share information: "What better place to do it once a year than face to face with everybody?"

I guess it all depends on whether you're paying taxes or spending them.

North Vancouver mom Sue Lakes Cook, for example, agrees with me that the real problem with B.C. municipal governments is they're living high off the hog, while many taxpayers are not. And I agree with her we need a municipal ombudsman to protect us from them.

Cook earns $13 hourly as a customer service rep. And she's appalled at the "insane" salaries enjoyed by employees of her local municipality, the City of North Vancouver, with many earning at least double those of the folks they're supposed to be serving.

Cook is also angry at the way city staff keep fobbing her off when she queries them about expenditures. She's now asked to go before Mayor Darrell Mussatto and council to get those questions answered. And Mussatto promised Tuesday to give her that chance.

Cook, in fact, would have been an ideal speaker at the UBCM convention — not simply because her dad was a longtime North Vancouver District councillor, but because she clearly knows the value of a dollar.

"I'm probably the only person in the whole world who actually gets the budget and goes through it page by page," Cook told me, noting city staff insisted on mailing her a copy this year, at a cost of $9. Indeed, on postage alone, the city spent almost $60,000 last year.

The City of North Vancouver is the smallest of the three North Shore municipalities. But Cook points out it has 480 employees, with 143 of them making $75,000 a year or more.

City manager Ken Tollstam made $254,000 last year. And Mussatto earned $119,000, $91,000 as mayor and $28,000 as a Metro Vancouver director.

Mussatto told me that city staff salaries were in line with those of the other Metro Vancouver municipalities. However, he said, the city had many long-serving staff, which "does push up the bill."

Cook said she's particularly concerned about the hefty salaries of the 66 employees in the fire department, given there were just 84 fires to fight last year. She knows of two young firefighters who made $90,000 and $93,000, respectively. Fire Chief Barrie Penman made $171,000.

But when she asked for the department's total wages and expenses, she was told the information "was not routinely or readily available."

"I guess the thing that annoys me the most is just the way they play with me with these answers," she said. "They have absolutely no respect at all . . . I know who the serf is, and it's not those folks at city hall."

I agree with most of what Cook has to say about city hall secrecy, arrogance and unsupportably high salaries, pensions and other benefits. They're shaping up to be major issues in the coming civic elections. And that's long overdue.

I'm wondering if she will forego any salary above 13 bucks if she runs and gets in? I think that if people want to get in on reducing wages, it becomes a problem for them ... I don't know of anyone ever refusing the compensation. Having said that she needs the same consideration for votes as she is willing to stand up for her beliefs.

Why is it always about reducing wages? Why don’t we look at downsizing and rightsizing local government? Why is it that local government downsizes through attrition? Instead of waiting for some of these fossils to retire why not layoff, early retire, or reclassify the positions. Seems the only requirement needed for some jobs is a heartbeat.

I wish she would run too. I think Sues voice needs to be heard at City hall.

She would work hard as a councillor. The 35,000 a counc. earns equates to about $17 per hour if considered as a full time job. She would be earning herself a well deserved but, very modest wage increase.

To their credit, DNV has been on a campaign to reduce their upper management with at least one high profile departure recently, and there are more to come. The City should take the same approach, given that they have more staff, a nigher payroll, half the population and one sixth the land base. Just what do they do all day?

Good for Sue, for taking action with what so many people in CNV are thinking. With Keating's "living wage" motion and staff spending time determining what that means (see the Outlook today). Yes, his campaign has started for the NDP and good for Heywood to call him on it.

Just out of curiosity, of the salaries that Sue Cook finds so objectionable, what would those same jobs earn in the private sector? The reality of the situation is, that there needs to be reasonable parity in the salaries otherwise the municipality would lose staff to the private sector. This isn't to discount that there may well be inefficiencies in municipal staffing and that there may well be a need for reduced staffing and more efficiencies, but I think we need to look at the types of jobs that are commanding the higher salaries before being critical of those salaries. As I understand it, there are a lot of engineers, accountants and other professionals employed by municipalities and they should be paid on a level comparable to their private sector counterparts.

The fact that Cook only earns $13 per hour is really not pertinent to the discussion. What's her training, experience, qualifications? The article says she's a customer service rep - well that could be anything from a counter person at A&W to a call centre employee. Her ability to earn a good salary could well be hampered by personality, poor qualifications, or miserable bargaining skills. Comes off as sour grapes more than anything. I remember her frequent posts here and she often came off sounding as though the government owed her something.

The nice thing about the city is if you have no morals, lack ethics, and even lack the skills for a position you will still get hired if you have a friend already employed. Six figure salary included.HR supports nepotism.

There are a too many muni managers who are given "make work" to do. Much of the work related projects they do on paper will never actually be implemented because our municipalities do not have the cash to implement them. Those "projects" are then shelved for the future, but over time they become obsolete and the whole process is started over again. What a waste!

Must be talking about the operations and applications managers at the city? Rumour has it they were friends of the IT manager and are part of a plan by the corporate services director making a run for the city manager’s job. Politics at its finest.

There is strong evidence that municipal (and likely other government) employees are earning almost 30% more than their private-sector counterparts. That's not chickenfeed, especially when they are often not producing something useful for their efforts. I have personally been involved in committees that should be implementing policy decisions arrived at in meeting two or three, yet the bureaucrats still want to meet to confirm or even revisit what were supposed to be decided courses of action. That tells me they don't have enough to do because there is no need to be efficient with their time. That being the case, downsizing is likely long overdue.

What is really scary about this is that the developers finance the councillors/mayors' campaigns. And then they are elected, and then the developers make tons of money and walk away with their pockets full at the expense of the current residents.

Solution: Get the developers out of the democratic picture. They make too much money. Why do they have to make so much money at the tax payers' expense?

5:22, that is the biggest load of nonsense I've read. Let's stop the unions from contributing as well, so that they don't have influence on the ridiculous salaries and benefits being payed for by the tax payers!

She described her youth - born into affluence and living in tony Delbrook. A priviledged young lady.

By her own candidly detailed blog description she described her slow deconstruction of her own life. Through a series of poor choices she described her estrangement of family and friends and diminishing employment opportunities. She proceeded from Delbrook to Lynn Valley and finally lower Lonsdale.

She wrote frequently about the poor in our community, a group in which she included herself.

To her credit she took personal responsibility for her reduced situation and you've got to give her A for honesty.

HOWEVER, elected as a community leader and decision maker??

My elected decision makers have a proven track record of making sound life decisions - not the contrary.

As the song "Sunshine" goes, "He can't even run his own life I'll be damned if he'll run mine."

Place monitoring cameras at the staff entrances of local government. Run face recognition software to match to staff. In time the results will show staff productivity and who needs to be downsized. Simple and cost effective.

The issue should not be about being financially advantaged compared to other municipalities. The real issues are why do we need 3 disparate fire services, library system, and recreational system and the administrative overhead that accompanies them? It seems logical that we only need a North Shore Fire department, North Shore Library, North Shore Recreational Services.

Anon 7:07pm - NVC isn't any different than any other municipality, you are correct. The issue is that municipal (and likely other government) employees are earning approximatey 30% more than their counterparts in the private sector, and there are more of them earning that 30% than is necessary to do their jobs effectively and efficiently. That to me smacks of waste of the worse kind and I personally resent paying for it. It's time to call a halt to these generous union contracts and empire building by bureaucrats who are responsible for the day to day operation of municipalities.

You, like many people concerned with high municipal service costs, think that the bureaucrats responsible for day to day operations are responsible for high salary and benefit costs.

They're not.

All wage contracts (salary and benefits) are ratified by Mayor and Council. The municipal bureaucrats have no authority to approve contractual salary or benefit levels to the unionized (vast majority) of the workforce.

They're just left to implement the salaries and benefits as approved and directed by council.

Needed urgently in the CNV: Mayor candidate. Also the issue of shared services, i.e. fire department - why 3 fire chiefs? The City only has one firehall. What about all the contract employees and "consultants" the City hires so that they can say they're not increasing the payroll.Yes John, good letter today in the NS News.

Anon, Sunday, October 02, 2011 5:10:00 AM, where did I say that the bureaucrats were responsible for the wages they are receiving? It is the politicians who ratify the contracts, as you say, and I blame them for not having the cajones to say no to overly generous compensation packages. However, it is the bureaucrats who somehow manage to justify to the politicians the need for hiring more staff.

Sit in council meetings and watch the special interest groups get council's attention and approval (read votes) using your money. It happens all the time.

These are not a bureaucrat driven initiatives. They're council's sop to the noisy self-interest groups.

The bureaucrats know full well that once council look like heros in the public meeting they will tell senior staff to take on the new service but find the funding inside the existing budget.

Result? Other stuff that was fully funded gets stripped leaving a lower level of core service funding. The outcome is complaints about poor core service delivery. Who looks like they can't do their job? The senior bureaucrat thereby jeopardizing their employment.

You're right that council doesn't have cojones but it's not about the bureaucrats. They're just an easy target.

Sorry, but I do not hear people en masse demanding hockey rinks, baseball diamonds, more police, bylaw officers, playparks, street maintenance, flower beds, golf courses etc. to be paid for from the public purse.

Computer replacement, City of North Vancouver. IT manager claimed 80% of the computers were over 5 years old. This was simply not true because 25% of the computers were replaced yearly. Oldest could only be 4 years. City disposed of a majority of computers being only 1, 2, and 3 years of age. Budget $650,000.00.

Many business applications at end of Life, City of North Vancouver. IT manager replaces document management system with and end of life product. Why replace end of life product with another end of life product. Budget unknown but safely estimate hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Payroll system end of life, City of North Vancouver. IT manager communicates to council that the payroll system is at end of life. Current payroll system is fully supported by vendor. Cost for new payroll system $600,000.00.

Well, here's the way I see it. In 2014, I doubt very much that Richard Walton will run, ditto DMD. It's likely that Pam Bookham will also call it quits, if she hasn't already this year given the toxic nature of NVC Council meetings. Ken Tollstam, the manager of NVC is ready to ready to retire as are several other highly paid senior bureaucrats in both the City and the District. I really don't think the timing could be better for amalgamating the two jurisdictions with minimal disruption for all concerned.

Add the city fire hall to the district fire halls. Early retire the chief and deputies at the city.With the savings hire some more fire fighters. Call it the North Shore Fire Department. There all reconciled.

I don't think North Vancouver is large enough for a ward system. There are certain differences between areas, but not enough to justify wards. Even Vancouver has rejected them, although there is an east-side/west-side "flavour" and they seem to elect their Councillors based on right versus left political leanings. I think the existing commnity association format works well, in most instances except Lower Cap where they are fighting for supremacy amongst two or three associations, each purporting to be "the one"...

Until there are Councillors elected in the City with an appetite for this discussion there's probably no point. So far no one is willing to touch it, not even making a motion for a report on the repercussions. Think there is a push for union supporting candidates also. aaaaaaaaahhh!!

Council has the authority to establish services levels and staffing for those levels as long as they are in accordance with WCB requirements. So attrition and fewer staff is within council's authority. Problem is that will almost certainly lead to reduced service levels which will upset some voters.

Re the "just say no" to contract demands. Nice idea but as long as you have union dominated cities (NV City, Burnaby etc) and they make a sweetheart deal with their unions, then a contract arbitrator will award a similar deal to your union whether council likes it or not.

Last time around there was "partial joint bargining" as some cities decided to go it alone giving generous raises to their union staff far in excess of the consumer price index increases.

Once they did that, strike or no strike (with Vancouver and the District of North Vancouver standing firm), all CUPE union members were brought up to the high contract settlements by arbitrators.

The only hope is a firm commitment by cities to bargain as a region but the CUPE dominated cities are happy to go it alone for obvious reasons, then setting a wage and benefit level high above private sector settlements that all achieve through arbitration.

Came across this website for a running candidate Mr. Ron Pollyhttp://www.ronpolly4northvan.ca/ followed it to his FB and Twitter, but not much action there. Anyone in the know what we can expect from this candidate?

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